


Margo Fucking Fixes It

by Soliyra



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: 413 Fix-It, Adult Language, Dark, Gen, Homicidal Ideation, M/M, POV Margo Hanson, Season 5 AU, Suicidal Ideation, Suicide (mentioned), canon compliant 4x13
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-26
Updated: 2020-02-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:34:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22910314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Soliyra/pseuds/Soliyra
Summary: She wanted to scream.  She wanted to strangle someone.  She wanted to set this entire fucking forest on fire and then hike up Mount Olympus and stab any surviving gods she found there in the chest.  Repeatedly.  But more than anything, she wanted someone to fuckingfix it.To un-fuck the world.  To take the garbage fire that the universe had become and turn it into something better, a place where people could love each other and carve out some small sliver of happiness without everything turning to violence and pain.  She wanted the spiral of chaos to change into something she could deal with: something she could control.Margo Hanson was a goddamned king.  Not a princess.  Not a damsel in need of rescue.  If the world needed saving, she’d do it her damned self.
Relationships: Margo Hanson & Eliot Waugh, Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Comments: 17
Kudos: 38





	Margo Fucking Fixes It

**Author's Note:**

> This chapter has been unpublished for almost a year now, and I'm finally publishing it. I love this story. It's fully outlined (I recently cried reading the outline for ch 6), but I write so gd slowly. Here are the notes I wrote when I started working on MFFI: 
> 
> Dedication:  
> For Eliza, who said, ““Margo “has never met a problem she couldn’t fight, fuck, or figure her way out of” Hanson would never, ever just throw a crown into a sadness fire and fuck off to Fillory. She would be telling everyone to saddle up right the fuck now so they can go get her and El’s boy back, a Sorrow in each hand just in case some motherfuckers need stabbing along the way,” and to Summer, our High King in perpetuity. 
> 
> Foreward (April 2019):  
> I have read a lot of ‘fix-it fic’ over the last eight days and every single one gives me life. Honestly, they’re probably the main thing that’s kept me going this past week. I’ve seen a number of different fixes for the garbage fire of 4.13, but have yet to encounter one that uses this concept, which seemed pretty obvious to me. So obvious, in fact, that my brain strung together a scenario without my even really trying. I guess that this means that, even though I do not like writing fiction, that it’s up to me to write it. So I guess here we go with the first fan-fic since the self-insert Pern story I hand scribbled with pencil in a marble notebook in 1999. 
> 
> I was going to write a bullet-outline for tumblr but when I tried writing down the series of events my brain started whining, _“But what’s my motivation?”_ like a pretentious actor, so now it has _description_ and _dialogue_ and such. My brain can be a real jerk sometimes. 
> 
> Thanks go out to the many, many beta readers for MFFI. Big thank you to ceeainthereforthat -you were the first person to EVER read any of my fanfic, and your feedback was incredibly helpful. Thank you for taking time out of your schedule to read my work. Also Elektra, highkingeliot, kh530, and others I'm sure I'm forgetting (please contact me so I can give credit)

Epigraph:

_I’m the phoenix_

_And the ash._

_Red eyes shining in a camera flash._

_My secret_

_Is I don’t keep none._

_See something, go ahead and say something_

_I ain’t afraid of it._

_I don’t drown,_

_Won’t stay down,_

_Heat finds a way to rise somehow._

_Scan the crowd as I’m_

_Coming out, and I_

_Don’t see too many rivals now._

-Dessa, “[5 Out Of 6](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WauMPwyW5s)”

Act 1: _I don’t drown_

The sun was bright, the air was cool, and the wind smelled like petrichor and decaying leaves, with just the slightest hint of opium. 

Margo and Eliot were in Fillory. Three-hundred-years-in-the-future-Fillory, to be exact, and they were trying to figure out what the fuck to do next. 

Hundreds of years had passed in an eyeblink and some unknown asshole was on the throne. _Margo’s_ throne. Her kingdom had been taken and two _more_ of the people she loved were almost certainly dead. It was bullshit. There’d been a lot of bullshit going around lately. 

The two magicians made their way through the orange wood. Margo was seething. She was always seething, but she tried not to let it show, wrapping her feelings up in stiletto heels and a magenta jacket thick enough to keep the whole bullshit world at bay. Eliot was quiet and distant, an apparition in black silk. She had fought so hard for so long to get him back, but it was like he wasn’t back at all. Quentin’s death had hit him hard. Probably the hardest of any of them. He’d grown quiet and withdrawn, and she’d catch him staring at nothing from time to time and have to snap him back to reality. Literally. She’d snap her fingers right in his face, saying, “Hey. El. Where’d you go?” and he’d give his head a small shake and slowly come back to her. Margo knew that Eliot and Quentin had been close, so she was trying to give him the time and space he needed to grieve, even though it frustrated her. Grief looked and felt different for everyone. Eliot’s grief looked like dark clothes and a tattered copy of the persona he’d always used to hide his pain. It wasn’t hiding much, this time. Either the mask had grown thin with disuse or the pain was just too strong to conceal. 

For Margo, grief _felt_ an awful lot like being pissed off. It was a low sting, a buzzing pain in her chest that never fully went away, offset by a simmer of anger deep in her belly, always churning, always railing, raging at the sheer injustice that her friend was gone far too soon. It _looked_ like suave confidence and raunchy jokes. It _looked_ like carrying the team, being the strong one, _always_ being the strong one, holding El’s head above water long enough for him to heal. Pushing down the anger and locking it away behind forced cheer and a convincing smile. 

That had been the dynamic for days, her holding shit together (trying desperately to hold shit together), while he drifted through life like a sable-clad balloon. And she had _kept_ holding her shit together even after they’d found out that the Fillory they were wandering was _wrong_ , that everything she’d known was _gone_. She kept smiling and kept moving, putting one foot in front of the other until she could figure out how to get her kingdom back, a tall, black shadow trailing at her designer heels. 

She’d thought the farm-stand off the dirt trail would have been a good place to grab lunch, maybe stop and rest a while. Little did she fucking know. 

They were still at least fifty feet away when Eliot froze in his tracks. He muttered a long, drawn out, “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuk…” before swallowing, clenching his teeth, then pivoting on his heel and fleeing in the opposite direction, his long legs moving faster than they had since he’d gotten out of the hospital (faster, honestly, than was probably safe for his injured body). 

Today kept getting better. A runaway, injured goth-boy was _exactly_ what she needed. 

“Shit,” said Margo and started after him. 

She found him several minutes later, slumped against a wide Fillorian tree trunk, attempting, unsuccessfully, to light a cigarette with shaking hands. “El?” she said. “El! What’s going on?” She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him smoke. Where had he even gotten a cigarette from, anyway?

She crouched in front of him, putting their faces on the same level. His eyes darted around the forest, anywhere but at her. “Jesus. Are you ok?”

 _That_ question elicited the bitter scoff it deserved. Fair enough. He put the unlit cigarette to his lips, taking a drag of smoke that wasn’t there. He shook his head. And kept shaking it. The mask was well-broken now. “I…” he said. “I can’t do this. I can’t do this, Margo. I can’t. I can’t do this…” The cigarette wedged between his fingers moved back and forth from his mouth like a caffeinated hummingbird, never still. 

This was getting ridiculous. She shifted forward and grabbed both his wrists, bringing her face close to his. “El? Eliot! I need you to look at me. Look at me, m’kay?” 

His head and body shied as far away from her as the tree and her grip on his wrists allowed, but, to his credit, he stopped fidgeting and met her eyes. His wrists were shaking.

“Look, I know there are things you haven’t been telling me, and I haven’t asked because I’m your friend and I respect your boundaries,” she said. “But if you’re gonna lose your shit every time we get near produce, it’s gonna be a problem. So I think that now would be a _real_ good time to start telling me _exactly_ what the fuck is going on with you. Spill.” 

He wilted, head and body sagging against the tree. He looked down and muttered something she didn’t catch. She waited, tilting her head and raising an eyebrow. 

“It’s not all produce,” he said, like he’d just been caught with his hand in a cookie jar. He sighed. “The smell. I’d forgotten what Fillorian peaches smelled like. It’s…” His eyebrows drew up in the center in that way that felt like a knife to her chest. “It’s not the same as the ones we have on Earth. It’s not even the same as my memories. Just…too much, too real, too…” he trailed off, breaking eye-contact again. 

_Peaches_. _Fuck._ “So this has to do with…” Was there a tactful way of putting this? Screw it, euphemisms were easier. “…The peach you threw in the fire?” She frowned. “You know, you never told me why you chose a peach. I figured it was personal and you’d tell me when you were ready, but this is obviously a problem and I don’t have the fucking time to wait for you to be ready. So you’re going to tell me. _Right now._ ” The High King wasn’t used to being disobeyed. 

He leaned his head back against the tree trunk, squeezing his eyes shut. “Do you remember,” he began in the quick, tight singsong that came out when he was nervous, “getting a basket of fruit with a note in it as a wedding present when you married Fomar?” 

She gave him a level look. “… _Yes,”_ she said. A little hard to forget, that: finding out that two of your best friends are suddenly dead. _Dead_. She felt a shiver of déjà vu thinking of that day. How many times would she have to bury them?

Eliot swallowed. “Well, about that…”

And then he told her. He told her everything. The mosaic and the throne room and the Happy Place and the never getting to say goodbye, never getting to say ‘I’m sorry.’ 

Margo was horrified. Not at the story itself, but at the fact that _she hadn’t known._ She listened in a state of mute shock, eventually letting go of her friend’s arms and joining him to sit against the tree, her shoulder against his, maintaining a physical connection as he exposed his soul. By the time he got to the end, the waking up, the finding out, their heads were leaning together, each supporting the other. Neither would have been able to hold up on its own. 

How could she have missed it? Her best friend hiding something the size of an entire lifetime. For months! The signs were there, now that she knew what to look for: the subtle changes in the way that Eliot and Quentin had interacted after the wedding. The way that Q had stayed at the monster’s side, enduring who-knows-what to keep Eliot’s body safe. And she hadn’t known. She’d been so caught up in her own shit that she never even thought to ask. The anger always-present in her belly flared, partly at Eliot for _not telling her_ , but mostly at herself. She could have been there. She _should have_ been there to smack Eliot upside the head for doing something so monumentally _stupid_ as walking away from that chance at happiness. Should have been there for Quentin when Eliot was possessed, so that neither of them would have had to go through it alone. 

The sheer weight of the injustice, the _unfairness_ , of the entire situation was only starting to penetrate her armor when Eliot sighed and said, “And the _worst_ part… is that he’d be alive right now if it weren’t for me.”

 _The fuck?_ Margo whipped her head around so fast it left Eliot off-balance, suddenly missing his support. She hadn’t headbutted him in the face, though that might have been appropriate, under the circumstances. “What,” she said, “the _fuck_ are you talking about, Waugh?”

“I’m the reason he’s dead,” he said, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world. A wincing half-smile and a tight, humorless laugh. “I basically killed him myself.” 

_Great._ “Okay,” she said, authority creeping into her voice, “you’re gonna have to back up because I don’t follow.” 

“Fifty years, Margo. I know-- I _knew_ him. He talked to me…told me…things. Not at first, but…later.”

He looked her dead in the eye. “He told me how much he thought about dying. About the ways he’d imagined killing himself. About how--“ bitterness, “— _maybe_ he wouldn’t even need to. How he sometimes wished that he could just _die_ , maybe in an accident or some heroic self-sacrifice. He didn’t talk like that all the time, or even often, but it was often enough to scare the crap out of me. Did you know that back on Earth he had days where he’d cross the street without looking? He told me he wasn’t afraid of the cars because he didn’t give a shit about his own _life_. Even in Fillory, I’d catch him sometimes, staring at a cliff edge or the lakeside with this _look_. And I would take his hand and bring him back. Back to me. 

“Sometimes at night,” he took a ragged breath, “he’d tell me about how he wouldn’t mind dying. When he said things like that, I’d take him in my arms, kiss him on that beautiful little head of his, and say, as sweetly as I could, ‘I’d mind. I would miss you.’ I could feel his body relax every time I said it. We’d stay that way, me holding him, until we both fell asleep. It felt like I was holding him to reality, like if I let go he’d slip away and be gone forever. In the mornings he’d be back to normal, and we’d just…get on with our lives, nothing to show for it but a few salt-stains on the pillows. 

“We did this for years, so long and so often that eventually, when he was having a rough time he’d just say, ‘Tell me you’d miss me,’ and I would, because I knew how much he needed to hear it. He needed someone to hold on for.” 

He’d been playing with the cigarette, turning it over and over in his fingers, for several minutes, but at this point he stopped and tucked it carefully into his vest pocket. He swallowed. “I took that away from him.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “I never asked how long he stuck around, after I… But I don’t think it was long.” 

“Eliot,” Margo began, “you can’t—” but he cut her off with a wave of his hand. 

“No, Bambi,” he said, “I’m not done. _I wasn’t there_. They told me what happened in the Mirror Realm, how he could have gotten away, how he wasn’t moving fast enough. Like someone who _didn’t give a shit about his own life._ And I. Wasn’t. There.” 

“You can’t possibly blame yourself for being unconscious in the hospital-“

“No.” He oriented toward her, emphatic now. “You don’t get it. From what I can tell, he’d been like that for _months_. And I wasn’t there. All he had was a monster who looked like me, making everything worse. And before you even start, no, that was my fault too. If I hadn’t shot Charlton it would never have happened.” The pitch of his voice was rising now, becoming more strained. “…And I only did _that_ because he was going to stay in fucking _Blackspire._ Because he didn’t give a shit about his own life even _then._ Because some asshole, some absolute fucking _asshole,_ had told him that he wasn’t enough. That what we had, our life, our _family_ , wasn’t good enough to want back.” 

He stared at her for several seconds, the whites of his eyes making bloodshot circles around his irises as the lower lids filled with water. Then he threw himself back against the tree trunk, pressing his eyes closed, pushing the tears out to run down his cheeks. 

Margo didn’t have a goddamned thing to say. This was a bigger clusterfuck than she could have possibly imagined. 

“I’m _beginning_ to believe,” said Eliot, in a tone of forced cheer that made Margo’s blood run cold, “that it’s me. That this is my life now. First Mike, now Q. I am…” he drew himself up, back straight, a sarcastic nod to ‘unearned imperiousness,’ “… _fated_ to forever kill the men I love.” 

Okay, that was just about enough of _that_. The anger simmering in Margo’s belly roared to a boil. It filled her up, burning through her chest like a shot of whisky. Because she remembered. She remembered the weeks after Mike had died, what it had felt like: the stone of chilly fear that sat in her chest cavity while she watched her best friend slowly self-destruct. The knowledge, beyond a doubt, that one of those days he would OD and die on her and leave her all alone, and that there was _nothing_ she could do to fix it. She never wanted to feel that way again. And she knew that this time, _this time_ , there would be no crown and blood test to save him from drowning. _There’s no easy way to say this_ _, so I’ll just say it. Eliot and I are both dead._ How many times would she have to fucking bury them? 

  
She wanted to scream. She wanted to strangle someone. She wanted to set this entire fucking forest on fire and then hike up Mount Olympus and stab any surviving gods she found there in the chest. Repeatedly. But more than anything, she wanted someone to fucking _fix it._ To un-fuck the world. To take the garbage fire that the universe had become and turn it into something better, a place where people could love each other and carve out some small sliver of happiness without everything turning to violence and pain. She wanted the spiral of chaos to change into something she could deal with: something she could control. 

Margo Hanson was a goddamned king. Not a princess. Not a damsel in need of rescue. If the world needed saving, she’d do it her damned self. 

She stood, rising in a single, graceful motion. She regarded her disheveled friend, chin raised, hands on her hips. “Fuck. Fate,” she said. 

Eliot blinked up at her, a small frown fluttering across his features. 

She squared her shoulders. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that destiny is bullshit? We’re writing our own goddamned story.” 

Months before (lifetimes before), Margo had received a letter in a basket of fruit. It had started with death, but that wasn’t how it ended. _We took the quest as far as we could, and now there’s something we need you to do._

She’d fixed this once before and she was damn well going to do it again. 

**Author's Note:**

> This is the part where I babble at you. 
> 
> So this chapter has been sitting, complete but unpublished, for about 11 months. I wanted to wait until the whole story was finished before I started publishing it. Then I wanted to wait at least until ch 2 was drafted out. This still hasn't happened. I write slowly, and have long stretches where I don't write at all. Eventually it began to look like I wouldn't publish it at all. Then a couple of things happened. 
> 
> Yesterday, Gigi retweeted something about people enjoying fics even if they were never finished. Then, this morning...well, I'll just copy-paste the tweet: 
> 
> _it's 8:30 am and 5 out of 6 has come up on shuffle twice and appeared in my twitter notes. Is ipod divination trying to tell me something? Is it trying to tell me that I'm a badass? or just that I should publish that unfinished fic..._
> 
> Listen. I'm skeptical when people talk about receiving "messages from the Universe," but this was a bit heavy-handed, even for me. "Thrice I say, and done." When you ask a fairie to do something three times they're supposed to do it. So, fine, Universe. Here you go. In return could I maybe get inspiration to finish the story? Because I'd really like to read it some day.
> 
> This chapter is labeled 'Act 1' but it's functionally more of a prologue. Conceptualized to be 1/3 of the story [heh, try 1/10th], _I Don't Drown_ bridges the gap between canon [signs to ward off evil] and the fix, reconciling OOC moments and bringing the characters to where they need to be to start their work. We see Margo complete this arc, which, I believe, makes it a complete mini-story, so I'm not _that_ uncomfortable publishing it on its own. Still, it's the first thing I wrote in the fandom so it's a bit rough. I really hope I can show you what happens next! 
> 
> [re: commenting on this work: please leave comments regarding the text of this piece, but know that I have not seen s5 and my engagement in the fandom has been very limited. I have no idea of anything that has happened since about October 2019, and I DO NOT WANT TO KNOW. Additionally, I'd like to finish writing MFFI without being spoiled for the show. Please be respectful; don’t make me regret posting this. Thank you.
> 
> Please also note that stupid-sounding names are kind of my authorial trademark. Don't hold it against me.]
> 
> ETA: I have noticed that, while I write slowly, I'm motivated to write about a paragraph on ch 2 every time someone leaves a comment. I didn't set out to do this but it's happening, so thank you and keep commenting!


End file.
